Project Management : the Fundamentals

This lecture defines what a project is, a unique effort with a specific objective, a start and end date, and a budget, using the project management iron triangle of scope, cost, and time, and distinguishes project mode from the ongoing, repeatable activities of a business.

This lecture explains why organizations need project managers to orchestrate the transformation of an idea into a finished product or service, coordinating multiple teams, respecting deadlines and budgets, and improving communication between stakeholders.

This lecture presents the five phases of a project life cycle according to the PMI, initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control, and closing, and explains the difference between how these phases unfold in Waterfall versus Agile project management, with a mobile app example.

This lecture details the initiation phase of a project, defining the problem to solve using the five whys technique and setting a SMART objective, specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound, before seeking the executive committee's go or no-go decision.

This lecture explains the business case, the document a project sponsor uses to convince the executive committee to invest in a project rather than a competing one, showing alignment with organizational objectives and a positive return on investment.

This lecture explains how to define a project's high-level scope, what is included and excluded, using a house construction example, and how to identify dependencies with other projects that could impact delivery.

This Q&A lecture addresses whether it is necessary to explicitly list what is excluded from a project's scope, or whether defining what is included is enough, illustrated with a system migration example showing how ambiguous terms like maintenance can cause costly misunderstandings.

This lecture covers the feasibility study conducted during project initiation to confirm a project is technically and financially achievable, checking whether the organization has the budget, expertise, and resources needed, or whether external help is required.

This lecture presents the project charter, or scoping note, the document that closes the initiation phase, summarizing the project name, sponsor, objective, scope, constraints, risks, assumptions, and stakeholders in a concise, non-technical format that must be signed before planning begins.

This Q&A lecture clarifies who typically plays the sponsor role in an organization, how it differs from the executive committee, and the sponsor's responsibilities in securing resources, arbitrating decisions, and presenting project results.

This lecture explains the purpose of the planning phase, analyzing, evaluating, and organizing the project into tasks with cost and duration estimates, illustrated by the historical failure of the Vasa warship to show the cost of skipping careful planning.

This lecture explains how the project manager builds the scope statement, a detailed document listing deliverables, exclusions, acceptance criteria, constraints, and assumptions, which serves as a contract between the project manager and stakeholders.

A practical exercise to list all the tasks of your own project based on its scope and deliverables, using Excel, Microsoft Project, or any other tool, as the foundation for tracking execution later in the project.

This Q&A lecture addresses why the project team is often not fully formed during initiation and planning, why organizations rely on subject matter experts instead, and how a project manager can secure the future team's buy-in to decisions made before it was assembled.

This lecture covers how to plan tasks by estimating their duration, adding time buffers to absorb delays, and accounting for cognitive biases like overoptimism, task criticality, and the experience level of the people performing them.

This lecture teaches how to build a Gantt chart, the visual timeline showing each deliverable, its duration, and its start and end dates, including how to identify tasks that must happen sequentially versus those that can run in parallel.

This lecture covers how a project manager estimates and tracks the project budget month by month alongside the Gantt chart, gathering input from team members, suppliers, and consultants while retaining responsibility for challenging unrealistic figures.

This lecture presents the three steps of project risk management, listing all risks, analyzing their probability and severity, and defining mitigation actions, illustrated with a house construction example covering technical, weather, and supplier risks.

A practical exercise to build your own Gantt chart, budget estimate, and risk list for your project, applying the planning techniques covered in this section.

This Q&A lecture addresses how to identify and assess risks specifically for internal IT development projects, covering technical, human resources, timeline, financial, and organizational risk categories with concrete examples for each.

This lecture explains the kick-off meeting that opens the execution phase, where the project manager presents the objective, key dates, team members, success criteria, budget, and risks to align the whole team and stakeholders before work begins.

This lecture covers the project manager's responsibilities during execution: keeping meeting minutes and a running action list, tracking task progress closely, and facilitating communication between the different teams and stakeholders involved in the project.

This lecture explains how to measure project progress precisely, avoiding vague status updates, by defining clear performance indicators and using tools like the Gantt chart or a Scrum burnup chart to track advancement against the plan.

This lecture covers how to track project spending against the budget estimate, using acceptable error margins to distinguish a normal variance from a real problem, and how to verify quality against the project's acceptance criteria at each milestone.

This lecture explains how to actively monitor project risks over time, updating their probability and severity as the project evolves, and implementing mitigation plans when a risk's severity increases, such as losing key team members.

This lecture presents the change request process for handling scope changes coming from clients, teams, or stakeholders during a project, covering what information to gather, how to document the request, and when a change should be approved or rejected.

This lecture covers how a project manager reports progress to the steering committee, presenting the plan, risks, budget, key achievements, and blockers, and how this committee can add resources or decide to stop a project when needed.

A practical exercise to define your own project monitoring and control routine: how often you will report to the steering committee, send status emails, and keep the client informed of progress.

This lecture explains the closing phase of a project, often overlooked but essential, covering client sign-off, capturing lessons learned, closing budget lines, and helping resources transition to their next assignment.

This lecture presents traditional Waterfall project management and the related V-model, their sequential phases inherited from 1950s military projects, and explains why these rigid methods struggle to accommodate changing client needs on modern projects.

This lecture defines Agile project management as a flexible, iterative, and incremental approach, using a hairdresser's website project example to show how breaking work into small, prioritized increments lets the team adapt to changing client needs.

This lecture gives an overview of the main Agile methodologies used to implement Agile project management, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, and Extreme Programming, setting up the closer look at Scrum and Kanban that follows.

This lecture presents the Scrum framework, its three roles, product owner, scrum master, and developers, its product backlog of user stories, and its sprint cycle with planning, daily scrum, review, and retrospective, illustrated with a fitness app example.

This lecture presents Kanban, the visual work management method created by Toyota, explaining how a Kanban board with a limited work in progress helps teams visualize tasks, spot bottlenecks, and improve flow without changing the existing organization.

This Q&A lecture explains who defines and prioritizes the tasks on a Kanban board, clarifying that the team self-organizes around a backlog and that work in progress limits, not task assignment, are what keep the process efficient.

This Q&A lecture addresses whether the Agile mindset and methods can be applied outside of IT, using a bootstrapped gym launch example to show how iterative, client-driven decision making applies well beyond software development.

This lecture presents Scrumban, the hybrid methodology combining Scrum and Kanban, showing how teams can start from a Scrum base and add work-in-progress limits and a visual board, or start from Kanban and add Scrum roles and fixed iterations.

This lecture presents Lean Six Sigma, the combination of Lean's focus on eliminating waste and Six Sigma's focus on eliminating defects, and explains its five-step DMAIC process, define, measure, analyze, improve, and control, widely used in manufacturing and pharma.

This lecture presents PRINCE2, the British process-based project management methodology built on seven principles, seven themes, and seven processes, covering everything from continued business justification to defined roles, and its certification path.

This lecture presents the PMBOK, the Project Management Body of Knowledge published by the PMI, a comprehensive reference guide organized into five process groups and ten knowledge areas, and the associated PMP certification for experienced project managers.

This lecture teaches the critical path method and PERT diagram, showing how to map task dependencies, calculate the longest sequence of tasks determining total project duration, and identify float on non-critical tasks using an online store example.

This lecture gives a practical framework for choosing between Waterfall, Agile, Prince2, or Lean Six Sigma for a given project, based on the project's objective, size, risk tolerance, team maturity, and the client's level of involvement.

This lecture recaps the most common mistakes project managers make, poor communication, making assumptions instead of asking questions, ignoring bad news, staying disconnected from the team, and giving overly optimistic delivery dates.

A companion resource listing the most useful project management tools, Sharepoint and Confluence for documentation, Jira and Trello for Scrum and Kanban boards, and Excel, MS Project, and Lucidchart for Gantt charts and PERT diagrams.